On April 2nd, over 3,000 people staged a 3 mile march through downtown Salinas in Central California’s fertile Salinas Valley to protest government budget cuts that will permanently close the city’s three public libraries. Demonstrators chanted: ¡Libros Si! ¡Bombas No! (Book yes! Bombs no!) ¡Si, Se Puede! (Yes we can!), and ¡Viva Chavez! as they snaked their way through poor neighborhoods to the Cesar Chavez Public Library. The libraries are the city’s community centers, where farm worker’s children can study, use computers, and wait after school until their parents come home from the fields. One marcher said, ‘When you close libraries, you are closing off opportunities. It is particularly wrong when you are closing them in a poor community. Where are the kids going to go to use a computer?’ Over 3,000 UFW Aztec eagle flags had been passed out to the demonstrators, so the march was a sea of red. All three of the public libraries in Salinas, the hometown of Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, will be closed on June 30th due to “lack of funds.” Salinas, known as “the Salad Bowl of the World”, is a city built on agribusiness where more than half of the population are native Spanish speakers.

The march not only included organized labor from the United Farm Workers (UFW), but also hundreds of poets, regional and local authors, artists, peace activists and library supporters. The marchers rallied in front of the Cesar Chavez library - one of the three branches scheduled for closure. The other two branches are named after Steinbeck, who took imagery from the Salinas landscape and it’s depression-era population when writing The Grapes of Wrath. The rally site included live bands on a stage sponsored by Radio Campesina, the UFW-owned station. The marchers joined with hundreds who had camped out overnight at the library to stage a 24-hour fundraising read-a-thon against the closings. The read-a-thon began with County Supervisor Fernando Armenta reading from Cesar Chavez’s Farm Workers Prayer, “Show me the suffering of the most miserable, so I will know my people’s plight. Free me to pray for others, for you are present in every person.” The readers were also joined by Salinas City Councilman Sergio Sanchez, who spent the night in a tent on the grounds and who noted that the read-a-thon never stopped throughout the night.

The shutdown would make Salinas the largest American city without a public library. UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta addressed the crowd, saying “This is not a poor community, this is a rich area. But the wealth… we know, is not in the hands of the workers, it’s in the hands of the growers. We want to get back some of the money we made for them to keep this library open!” Actor Hector Elizondo, best known for starring in TV’s medical drama Chicago Hope, told those assembled that libraries had been key to his own development, he called a library a sanctuary, “A place where you could be creatively subversive… and it changed my life because through books I started to question.” Elizondo also said that closing a library was like “putting a tourniquet around your mind.” The read-a-thon also attracted writers Anne Lamott and Maxine Hong Kingston. Poet and artist, Jose Montoya, one of the original members of the Culture Clash theater troupe, told the crowd that “It’s hard to comprehend why, of all things, you would want to close libraries… that’s so counterproductive.” Fernando Suarez, the father of a young US Army soldier killed in Iraq also spoke from the podium, and speakers repeatedly made the point that while hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent for war in Iraq… money cannot be found to keep libraries open at home. The libraries will close unless $500,000 is raised by June 30th, and even that amount of money will only keep the libraries open one day a week through 2005. At the march and rally thousands signed petitions asking Governor Schwarzenegger to keep the libraries open, and a much larger march is being planned for April 12th in the state’s capital of Sacramento where demands will be made for full funding of the libraries.

Lincoln Cushing, author of Revolution: Cuban Poster Art, came with a San Francisco Bay area delegation of the national Progressive Librarians Guild. Cushing told the crowd, “The Progressive Librarians Guild wishes to let the people of Salinas know that we see this issue as being at the forefront of public access in this country, and the labor community has a long history of resisting abuse, and one of the slogans is ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ Salinas may be taking the hit now, but we are all vulnerable!” Cushing’s remarks are in part verified by the American Library Association, who have been warning that hundreds of libraries across the country are reducing hours, eliminating staff, thinning inventories, and closing their doors due to lack of funding. The staff at Xispas understands this crisis in a historical context. The former dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, once said “I don’t want an educated population, I want oxen.” It seems that Somoza’s ghost now haunts our land, and a tourniquet is indeed being placed around the minds of working people. Compañeras y compañeros -it is time to resist. For more information, visit the Save Salinas Libraries website.